We’re doing what?
While I was researching a post I’m working on (you’ll see it soon, I’m really proud of it), I took a bit of time to look into interactive fiction. This led me to a Stack Overflow question with a lot of good answers about IF tools/systems, and I realized once again how cool Inform 7 is. I’ve also been listening to episodes of a Destructoid podcast called “Sup, Holmes?” (itunes, feed with mp3s), and in a number of episodes (episodes 15-18) he has interviewed people from the Toronto indie game community. They all spoke of things they had worked on at various game jams in Toronto, and I thought that sounded pretty cool. A game jam is just a bunch of people gathering (often physically, but sometimes digitally) and working on a game for a set period of time. At the end, you have a thing that probably sucks but gosh darn it you made it and you’re going to be proud of it!
Light bulb: why not combine the two?
So here’s what I’m proposing:
- Date: Monday (Labour Day)
- Time/length: From 12 pm until 4 pm, Eastern Standard Time - we all have other things to do, and we don’t all get up early. Note that I originally had allocated a lot more time for this; but I didn’t want to exclude people who have, you know, adult responsibilities. Next time we’ll do five hours. Perhaps it will be a two-part event, e.g. we all work on the same story next time.
- Who’s invited? I’ll get a few interested folks from Ottawa in my living room, but distant participants are welcome - I’ll set up some kind of video chat through Google Hangout/Skype/TinyChat/something so we can taunt each other and discuss stuff
- What do you make? The day of, I’ll announce the theme we’re going to write on by pulling one of several candidates from a hat - I’m open to suggestions on what our criteria are for a “finished” story, as I don’t necessarily want one person to write 10,000 words and someone else to write 300
- Then what? Then everyone works on their story all day, in whatever way they see fit!
- What happens when I’m done? We’ll use Inform 7’s export thing to put what we’ve made online!
This is meant to be difficult, because to the best of my knowledge I don’t know anyone who writes interactive fiction. The random theme aspect is designed to make it that much more challenging. What you produce doesn’t have to be awesome; it will probably be more fun to create than to play. At any rate, it’s just meant to be a fun event for us to hang out and do something interesting. I literally have no experience with this, and haven’t written creatively in a while, so I expect this to be really difficult. But you’re up for it, because you’re awesome!
Resources
I’m going to be continually adding resources that seem useful here, if you want to do a bit of research. Just try not to show us all up by reading everything like some kind of genius, alright?
For a practical introduction to Inform 7, check out this screencast by Aaron Reed. I’d forgotten about this video, actually; this was the first thing I ever saw about Inform 7 and it’s really quite impressive. He paints the system in a more prose-based light than some of the other more programming focused resources below. So at a bare minimum, give that a watch and then grab things below that seem useful.
One programming-language-y thing that I expect to be quite useful is rulebooks. I expect he’s right that using rulebooks as much as possible is a good idea, so do give that post a look and consider making use of them. Thinking about it a little, rulebooks are kind of like quirky interfaces - you have some behaviour that you want a bunch of things to share, so you put it in a single place and have them “consult” with the rulebook on what to do. Depending on the approach you take, this will either be incredibly useful or utterly irrelevant.
For in-depth tutorials on Inform 7, there’s a section on their site. The Recipe Book seems particularly useful.
For those of us with the background, Inform 7 for Programmers is long but informative. I actually find it to terse to a fault in some ways; it’s not very good as reference material to flip through.
If you’d like to see some source code as an example, check out the bottom half of this page which implements Cloak of Darkness, which seems to be an IF “hello, world” sort of story.
One of the StackOverflow answers recommended the section on design from the old Inform Designers Manual, Fourth Edition (DM4). So I’ve extracted that into its own PDF, which I’ve uploaded here.
Inform has an extensive library of extensions (shut up I am normally better at writing than that), which you can check out here - once you’ve got an idea of what you’re going to do, you might want to look around in there.
If you’d like to write a fight-y sort of game, you can check out an extension for Inform called ATTACK.
He also has a series of posts about designing a text-based dungeon crawler in Inform 7, if that’s your jam: pt 1, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4
If you run into anything interesting that I haven’t directly linked to, please do send it around to the rest of us. We’ll probably all be doing wildly different things, but you might inspire someone to change direction with whatever wonderful extension/blog post/whatever you’ve found.